


The Same Way

by failsafe



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alcohol, Episode: s04e02 The Other Side, First Kiss, M/M, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 13:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12888639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/failsafe
Summary: One day, you realise that there are some people you'll never see again. At least, not in the same way.– Iain Thomas





	The Same Way

**Author's Note:**

> Episode tag for “The Other Side [4x02].” This episode follows that one because it was the most recent episode I rewatched. It contains themes pertaining to questions about emotional infidelity. There may be hints of internalized homophobia in my efforts to be consistent in characterization and because it's still the year 2000, but if so it's subtle and I'm just forewarning that it's a possibility. There are also several attempts at subtlety in general in this fic, so hopefully there are no rogue locomotives or sudden developments from nowhere. The word “Nazi” as shorthand for “white supremacist” is used, but this isn't a plot or issue-fic; the plot was in the episode. Extremely unfortunate and gross topicality is purely coincidental with my rewatch.

After the debriefing, Daniel goes down to check in his gear. It doesn't make him feel much lighter. In front of his locker where he fishes out his civilian clothes, he doesn't feel particularly satisfied when he makes sure the sweater isn't turned inside-out. Wanting to ask a question and  _ wanting to know the answer _ , whatever it turns out to be, can be very different things. 

“Daniel,” says a voice with a certain familiar, almost-friendly, rising intonation.

He thoughtlessly continues shrugging off the dull gray-green jacket that makes him match-step with the man next to him, whether he likes it or not. He replaces it on its hanger, making quick work of it. With no greater sense of modesty but perhaps a bit more quickly, he goes through the motions to tug off the form-fitting black t-shirt to replace it with a looser, cream-colored sweater. It's when he is tugging the sweater over his head that he hears the purposeful movement beside him end with a soft, deliberate  _ clank _ on his locker door. Before his head emerges from the sweater, he finally answers. 

“Jack,” he says, mirroring dutifully but without a great deal of inflection.

“You're still pissed at me,” Jack says. His voice echoing into his locker obscures it a little but only seems to amplify the confidence in it. Confidence that he is right and confidence that it is a regular, temporary state that is bound to change but hasn't yet. It's maybe that last part that annoys Daniel a little more than he is already annoyed. He isn't sure why.

“No?” he responds, a question mostly because he isn't sure if it's a lie. He turns to the bench a little beyond and makes quick work of bracing himself and making big, exaggerated strides to change out his pants.

Jack snorts back a knowing chuckle. He doesn't seem to change as much even as he changes his clothes. Daniel has seen it hundreds of times now, out of the corner of his eye or more directly than that. No matter what he's wearing, Jack's uniform seems to be something that runs in a layer beneath his skin more than anything else. Daniel examines the little, perfect, round holes that make up a metallic surface immediately beyond his eyes. He doesn't know if it's an uncharitable thought or not.

Jack heaves a sigh that follows the last expressive sound he had made.

“Yeah, it's okay,” he says, apparently conversing with himself where Daniel won't. “Can't blame ya this time, a little.”

“Yeah?” Daniel asks, not really convinced of any of it. He doesn't know that he's still pissed off at Jack. He doesn't know that he isn't to blame if he is. He doesn't know that Jack actually wouldn't blame him if he were. He doesn't know a lot of things. Still, he asks because maybe whatever Jack stumbles into saying might make him feel better anyway – hitting a target in the dark.

“Yeah. I told you to shut up,” Jack answers quickly.

Wrong. He had been wrong, and Jack had been wrong. And this doesn't make him feel better.

He straightens his posture. He finishes putting away his things. He closes up his locker. Only then does he look at Jack, skeptical and a little sharp.

“Not like it's the first time,” he says. Then, he turns heel and walks away, ready to make his way up to the surface of the earth, to get some air, and drive home. They can start this again tomorrow.

  
  


He is halfway to the elevator's anterior room when he hears the distinctive, quick-plodding footsteps behind him, distinct from the others that make their way past and beyond him. He sighs, wondering why it is  _ this _ particular time that Jack can't let it go for the night. Because Jack had been right. It is a regular, temporary state that is bound to change. But it hasn't, yet. 

“Daniel,” comes the voice first. Then comes the hand. First, it claps him around the shoulder. Then, it grabs for his forearm and makes an effort to turn him around to face the voice. He half-turns voluntarily to surrender to it with another apparent, theatrical sigh for the effort.

He doesn't know what to do with the hand beneath his elbow. Without the starchy, resilient fabric of his jacket to protect it, he can feel the heat of Jack's hand working its way up through off-white fibers. He already feels warm at the back of his neck, and the extra body heat isn't needed or especially welcome. He closed his eyes for a second longer than a blink, summoning patience. While he does, he remembers the last time he had surrendered to Jack's sudden, abrupt touch – unbidden, otherwise.

Sense memory summons the sound of a DHD button being pressed. He almost feels the tactile feedback in his hand. Then, that same warmth that is at his elbow now had reached out and plucked his hand, midair, from pressing the second button. That had barely gripped at all, secure but with an eerie lack of insistence or pressure. It was the words that came with it that pressed the importance of the action, not the grip or the force or anything else about it. And somehow, it had made him blink and squint like he had just narrowly avoided a blow.

“What, Jack,” he says, clearly not a question. Pointedly so. But there's nothing loud about it. He pushes his elbow down, into Jack's hand and then out of it. He has no desire to make a scene or to grind whatever goodwill toward men Jack has going right now into the ground. He's just tired. He has to just be tired.

“Look, I'm sorry,” Jack spits out, getting through the apology like ripping off a band-aid. “Can we, just—”

“Just what?” Daniel asks, blinking and then raising his eyebrows. He is still standing there, waiting.

“I don't know,” Jack says quickly. He gestures in the direction of the elevator to the surface before he says anything else. “... Go to my place. Get a drink. Something.”

“... Excuse me?” Daniel asks. Then, he realizes that perhaps he sounded a little more affronted by the suggestion that he actually is. “Jack,” he tries again, “it's okay. Let's just... both go home and get some sleep, and I'm sure it'll—”

“Daniel,” Jack interrupts.

Daniel huffs over the lost word but allows it.

“Think of this as me making you less pissed off at me now instead of letting it stew overnight?” Jack requests, earnestly.

Daniel sighs and almost explains that it isn't necessary. Even the question has already started to dispel his annoyance  _ at Jack _ , but whatever it is still lingers there like a piece of something lodged in his throat. It hadn't all been about Jack, anyway. 

“Besides, I could really use a drink,” Jack adds, and somehow, the compulsory selfishness of it convinces Daniel to do it.

  
  


Daniel pulls up into Jack's driveway and puts the car into park. He unfastens his seat-belt and slides out of the car. He doesn't bother locking it here, while his keys and wallet are safely on his person. He feels like he has done it so many times that he doesn't even feel getting out of the car except for whatever he happens to say this time as he rejoins Jack's company, having pulled in right behind him.

“Have to be my own designated driver, so go easy,” he says. Even fresh air seems to have done his disposition some good, at least, even if the wedge in his throat hasn't moved.

“You're the designated driver, so you go easy,” Jack echoes back at him as he leads the way up to the door, rattling at his keys.

Inside the house, Daniel takes off his shoes by the door. Jack doesn't have a rule about it, but Daniel has been so many places where there was such a rule that he can hardly stand not to. This is Jack's home, and the shoes at the door rule had existed in so many cultures that there must have been something innate or sacred about it, somewhere.

“I don't like beer,” he says, but it sounds like the most tired line by now.

“You drank paint thinner in space,” Jack calls back as Daniel steps through to see him illuminated by refrigerator light.

Daniel allows himself to defer with a breath that lights on laughter but leaves it behind without getting fully acquainted. He touches the frame of the doorway that begins the wall that divides Jack's living room from his kitchen with a window cut out between. He waits until Jack has tendered two beers and twisted the caps from both of them. He presses one of the cold, glass bottles into Daniel's hand, and Daniel turns almost with Jack to go back down to the couch.

That wedge in his throat has gotten a little bigger by the time he sits down. He could anticipate the soft  _ thud _ in his chest that was coming when he hadn't managed to laugh at Jack's joke. Jack obviously still hadn't realized it, hadn't remembered. Of course, there was no reason he would. He had known Sha're for a few hours, at best, and the largest part of his memory of Abydos who wasn't sitting right next to him was free. Free, alive, and without his sister. 

For a little while, Daniel hated beer less.

  
  


Daniel was getting up for his third bottle when he was talking, a little too passionately for what he was saying.

“I did not say that I don't care that they were 'basically Nazis,'” he says. He manages the path back to Jack's refrigerator. He takes out the last two bottles from the six pack. Then, he thinks to set them aside while he fishes out the box. There's no point leaving an empty carton in the fridge. He is agile enough to flatten it a little before fishing it into the trash.

“Then what were you saying?” Jack calls. By the way his voice carries through the house, he can tell that it's a little wry in its intent. It's baiting him to respond with that same, pointlessly exuberant insistence that had just come out of his mouth a moment ago. Exuberance which is inevitably lost on Jack except, apparently, for its entertainment value. 

He takes his last bottle and Jack's back to the living room. He screws the cap off one and sets the other, still-sealed, on the table.

Jack is leaned back into the couch cushion, arms spread out wide across its back. He drops an arm to accommodate Daniel's return so it falls between them. He looks at the bottle that is for him, then at Daniel.

“I see,” he says, mock-hurt.

Daniel ignores him for a second to set the record straight.

“I'm saying that whatever the outcome was, maybe there would have been a benefit to listening to me in the first place.”

He watches Jack's eyes for some kind of recognition. Some kind of response.

Jack watches him right back for a little while. He doesn't say anything, but then he offers a half-shrug as his eyes fall away. He picks at some imperfection just above the knee of his jeans.

“... You see what?” Daniel asks, in spite of himself. Maybe they have pursued serious topics of conversation while mildly inebriated for long enough.

“I uncapped yours. You just threw mine down,” Jack complains. He straightens his posture a bit and nods forward, to indicate, and then to better appraise the object of his offense. “Crappy bartender.”

“Didn't realize I was one.”

“Therein would lie the problem,” Jack concedes with equally mocking sympathy. He glances over at Daniel's eyes again. He moves his arm so his elbow brushes him without quite jabbing in very hard. “Who taught you your manners?”

Knowing better than to take it all the places he could take it – anymore – Daniel picks the easiest and most retaliatory path he can.

“I've learned that manners depend greatly on the cultural context in which you find them,” he says clearly, pressing his lips together without forming a shapeless line from them. He presses his fingers together, verging on cracking his knuckles.

“Yeah, yeah. Keep drinkin' your beer. You're not dumbed down enough for me yet,” Jack says, also playing a part. The fact that Jack picks up his cue is a satisfying enough response.

Daniel sighs and takes his turn to fall gratuitously backward and fully into the couch cushion at his back.

“Can you turn on _a sport_ , or something?” he asks. 

The electromagnetic  _ click _ of the television switching on blares. Soft voices trying to make loud pronouncements begin to explain the game that is playing out on the screen. Daniel doesn't open his eyes. Maybe it lasts longer than the space of three breaths that Daniel counts – in-and-out – but when he opens his eyes, it is to a sense of being slightly closer to Jack than he was before. He sits up and shakes his head to clear it. 

“Do you remember the first time you came here?” Jack asks when Daniel meets his eyes, blinking but alert again.

Of course he remembered. He had been alone. He had been on a field-assignment turned world-saving job turned  _ life _ for so long that he had nearly forgotten how to reintegrate. Then, people had been offering him hotel fees and rental cars and stays in the barracks, and he hadn't known a single thing to do with those offers until he had found himself here. 

“I told you you were a 'cheaper date than my wife,'” Jack reminds him.

Daniel winces a little and glances at the two empty bottles and the third one he had taken a shallow sip from. It isn't just the thought that he might have overdone it just a little. His car is out in the driveway, probably still warm beneath its hood, but there's no way he is getting behind the wheel without at least another hour to let his mind clear.

“Yeah, well, I—” he tries to reply, but nothing easy-to-say comes. Instead, he remembers the way he had asked, innocently at the time, about Jack's wife. About whether or not he might meet her. Then, he had believed – _had to believe_ – that there was an immediate hope – just another few days, just another few trips through the Gate, just another few brushes with death, and then he would be _going home_. He sipped the heavy, bitter liquid again. 

“This isn't just about me telling you to shut up, is it?” Jack asks.

“No,” Daniel allows. He isn't sure what it's about. He breathes in and out, audibly, but it doesn't bring the immediate clarity he might have hoped for. It's too little, too late to wish he had stayed sober, too. His limbs feel heavy and warm, and the warmth feels almost distant and fake. He carefully reaches beneath the lenses of his glasses without smudging them much, rubbing at his eyes. “No.”

Before he clears is vision, he feels Jack's hand clap against his shoulder and linger there. It grips and moves and finds flesh to press its fingers into. He wonders how they got to this point. Months ago, he had walked out of this house feeling like the years he had known Jack were a lie. Now, he wonders if there's ever been anything since the first time he had come to Colorado that has been true.

That he could ever have hoped to keep.

“Look at me?” Jack suggests, kind but clearly uncertain.

Daniel drops his hand and surrenders, letting his glasses fall back into place. He looks at the steady, familiar brown and doesn't look away. He searches for whatever he was supposed to be finding there.

“When did you start _caring_ about me?” he asks. It's a little biting. It isn't fair. Almost immediately, he regrets it. After today, he doesn't think he can be blamed, but he still doesn't think it's right. He exhales sharply through his nose and looks away abruptly, a little shame-faced. 

“I don't know,” Jack says, but instead of pulling his hand back he just sort of jostles it there. Daniel raises his eyebrows at the hand and Jack's forearm as if they might be able to answer for themselves.

Daniel grips the neck of the beer bottle again, but then he soundly places it down on the coffee table. It makes a single, sharp, high-pitched sound as he deliberately slides it forward a little, like an oversized chess piece. The commentators talking away on the TV don't notice the sound, so Daniel convinces himself it wasn't quite as loud as it seemed to his ears – for Jack's sake.

“Well,” Jack says, “... I guess that's not really true, is it?”

“Hmm?” Daniel asks, inarticulate and abrupt.

“It's not really true, is it, that I don't know when I started caring about you. It'd have to be when you started caring about me.”

“And when was that?”

“You know that, Daniel. I wouldn't _be here_ if you hadn't come in and just... _insisted_ on caring,” Jack replies, almost scolding in his tone. Again, Daniel can't blame him, and he isn't being fair. Sometimes it's easier – just to pretend that they haven't changed at all. 

“Not my most-endorsed quality today,” Daniel replies, compulsively. Just knowing he should react a little more kindly doesn't mean he knows, exactly, how to stop hedging away from it.

“Hey, just because it's inconvenient as hell doesn't mean it's not... right,” Jack says.

Daniel's interest is piqued enough that he stops looking away, back toward the imaginary echo of that glass-on-glass  _ screech _ that had resounded a few moments ago. There are only so many obstacles he can create for himself. 

“And was I _right_ today?” he asks. 

“I think the official record reflects that,” Jack says dryly.

“I'm asking—Fine,” Daniel says, talking a little faster before catching his tongue. “I'm glad you still think I was right. That first time on Abydos.”

“Funny,” Jack replies.

“I'm serious, Jack.” Daniel sighs. “If you hadn't been the guy they'd sent to lead that mission, I don't know that it would've turned out half as well as it did. We might have just stirred up enough rebellion to let them all... die. And I wouldn't have... had... the time I had there, or a life at all,” he says.

“Thanks,” Jack says. Looking at him, Daniel things his eyes look darker, something in their gaze heavier than before. “... Are you okay here, Daniel?”

“Yeah, I am,” Daniel says, the words flowing in a way that feel a little more fluid than English usually does. He fees lulled, tugged into something that is almost like drowsiness. He knows that Jack wouldn't take offense if he were to just slide down and half-recline on the sofa and sleep it off. It wouldn't have been the first time. But it's only something _like_ sleep chasing after him, haunting at the corner of his field of vision so it narrows, tugging at the bottoms of his lungs so his breath comes deeper, parting his lips. 

“You mean... 'here' or... here,” Jack says. Daniel doesn't even try to answer him. Jack blinks a few times, but he doesn't seem especially interested in his beer or the TV. His brow works a little, frowning and then unfurrowing. His gaze flits down from Daniel's eyes. He reaches up so his thumb brushes across Daniel's cheek. It isn't gentle so much as a purposeful jab and swipe, intended to clear away dirt, or something.

That wouldn't have been the first time either.

Until now, Daniel had never really thought about – let himself think about – how natural that kind of thing had become, however few and far between.

  
  


It feels like he's being drawn into a dream, heavy and tinged with the bright halo that unreality tends to bring with it. Only, his eyes are closed. He cracks them open, and it doesn't get any better. Stubble on an upper lip is something he has not felt since exactly one time in college. His lips are parted, open, but he doesn't feel cool air and his own inward breath. Instead, it is shared warmth and familiar scent closer than it has ever been before. His mouth moves to bring the contact back together when it breaks, marginally and for a fraction of a second. The movement is so slow that it cannot be anything but deliberate. He feels it returned.

The searching touch comes from without. He feels the familiar, surprisingly gentle, surprisingly casual touch grip at the side seam of his sweater. His own hand is pressed to Jack's chest, the heel of his hand just below his collarbone. It is in a position that might have seemed to be a protest, a reparation to put back, but Daniel doesn't think it is. He can't remember how it ended up there. All at once, his fingers curl and close and grip at Jack's shirt, too. 

It has been so long since he has done this. Not that long, actually. He still feels like it has been forever since he has felt anything close to what he is feeling now. There is a deadly, poisonous kind of tug to it – wishing for oblivion. His lip slides against a more chapped one to match it. The jolt through his nerves doesn't feel  _ deadly _ . It feels  _ alive _ , unlike any other kind of being alive. It feels like being alive in the view of another person in a way that no one else can touch. He hasn't known that, known  _ someone  _ like that since—

“Jack,” he says, abruptly, right against Jack's mouth, changing angle so fast that the side of his nose touches in a place it shouldn't have. He crinkles it and pushes his glasses back up instinctively.

“Daniel...” Jack says. His voice is low, warning – no, not warning. Instead, it's more hoarse, taunting, and full of a kind of desire that Daniel – suddenly – doesn't know what to do with.

“I'm sorry, I... had too much to drink, and I...” he begins to explain.

“Daniel,” Jack repeats, a little more chiding and less low in his throat.

Daniel focuses forward, at nothing, and doesn't see two of anything. Suddenly, his hand grasps to his left as if to check for a jacket he hasn't carried in. Then, he is on his feet and paces a small circuit just past Jack's coffee table.

“I'm sorry, I've just gotta—” he explains.

“Dr. Jackson,” Jack tries, his tone now verging on a sing-song kind of gentle mask of annoyance. In the corner of his eye, he can see Jack touching and perhaps rubbing at his temple. The second that Daniel's eyes lock, at all, on the familiar, dark, steady gaze of Jack's eyes, he's gone.

  
  


Out in his car, he is sitting there in front of the steering wheel. His hands reach down and he tests out his grip – 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock, then 4 o'clock and 8:00. He fingers along the ridges that make up the back of the hard molding of the thing. He fishes out his keys and feeds the right one into the ignition. A few seconds later, when the rattling of the other keys in the sway of gravity has silenced, he turns it. The engine turns over with little fuss.

He sits there in a softly humming, vibrating car. On the dashboard, numbers have illuminated in a harsh blue-green. He glances at the time and tries to remember if it's right. He wonders how many minutes have passed since he had stormed out of Jack's house. He glances at the stairs he had come down, but it is a sidelong, reluctant glance.

He nearly leaps from his skin as there is a sharp, two-knuckled rapping on the glass of his window. He adjusts his focus and sees Jack making the rotating motion that tells him to roll down the window even though the switch on the car door is automatic. Reluctantly – very, very reluctantly – Daniel obeys.

“Do you remember what you said to me?” Jack asks. He doesn't seem perturbed or outraged or any of the things that Daniel seems to have cooked up in his imagination about the particular possibilities of something he had never – or maybe not quite never – imagined. It is as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened.

“Uh... when?” Daniel tries, testing his voice. He swallows. He wonders if Jack's lips are actually still a bit closer to a shade of red than usual. He rubs his own together, wondering the same. He wonders what dangerous, faulty nostalgia Jack has in mind now.

“You're your own designated driver,” Jack repeated to him, very clearly. He reaches into the car hand near Daniel's shoulder as he reaches in and unlatches the little tab that locks that door. Then, using the interior handle, he pops the door open. He is already holding it open, politely, before Daniel can summon a protest or consideration.

“Jack, I—” Daniel says, because he knows that he is a little bit beyond driving. “I can stay out here. About an hour and I'll be fine,” he promises. He leans his head back, thumping it a little against the rest made for it.

“Come on,” Jack insists.

Daniel looks up to grant him pointed eye contact.

“Jack, this is crazy,” he remarks.

“I know,” Jack says, dismissive. “Come on,” he insists.

“I'm not... really sure I'm making the right decision here. That we are. I know... I'm not military, but there are a lot of things going on here that I don't think you or I have ever even _thought_ seriously about considering,” Daniel says. 

“Daniel,” Jack interjects again. He pats a little against the car door. He leans in a little closer, and for a second it's like he doesn't still have a faint sense of Jack's breath on his. “I just need you to come inside. I'm... it can wait.”

Daniel considers Jack and the offer. He turns off the car. He pockets the keys as he stands up, nearly chest to chest with Jack as they face each other in his driveway.

“Jack,” Daniel starts, but apparently he isn't allowed to implore with Jack's name over and over and over in the same way. Jack already has an answer.

“Look, I don't know, but I know that I met _aliens_ and then I've been cloned and zapped and killed and enslaved and courted by some extremely dubious methods and met... all _kinds_ of strange folks, and... I know that... none of it happens without you. And you're not the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me anymore, and I don't think you could start being again,” Jack says, all in one deliberate burst that makes the back of Daniel's neck feel hot. He convinces himself it's because he's surprised Jack would launch into this in his driveway, even if he isn't particularly aware of any neighbors around. “Fair?” Jack asks when he's finished. 

Daniel can't offer anything but agreement to that. He feels like something caves a little bit more inside him when he starts to reroute himself back toward the steps up to Jack's door. He doesn't know where this is going, but he's gone up these steps so many times before. It feels different now – sick and intriguing and new and dishonest and alive and a way to inspire oneself to go after something so much, so relentlessly, that it's a good way to get oneself killed. It feels different when he steps back inside Jack's house and turns to see Jack pass by him. It feels different, but so do a lot of things.

 


End file.
